Making healthy options easier

As part of our commitment, we have added our voice to the coalition of shareholders led by ShareAction, a charity building the movement for responsible investment over the last decade. Recent dialogue between shareholders and Tesco has seen the company adopt a series of landmark health commitments, including a market-leading target to increase their proportion of UK and ROI sales from healthier food and drink products from 58% to 65% by 2025. Given that as a country approximately £1 in every £5 spent on food is at Tesco, changes like this will have a significant impact on the population’s diet.

What we have learnt

Throughout these different roles, some lessons have emerged:

• The power of networks. Whether for industry leaders such as Tesco working to shape best practice through the Collaboration for Healthier Lives, or charities like ShareAction harnessing the power of responsible investment, building strong networks with a shared goal is important.
• Health is on the corporate agenda. Many food retailers have developed comprehensive health and sustainability plans and are committed to bringing these to life. Increasingly, investors too view consumer health as a material ESG issue. Transparent reporting on progress can help to accelerate positive change more widely across industry and policy.
• The need to work within the current policy environment, whilst also striving to reshape this for the future. Leaders within industry can initiate a wide range of changes to make a positive difference to population health. However, national policy changes are also required in order for these changes to be sustainable and impactful at scale.
• Engagement and partnership work is a continually evolving process. Our shared work to tackle food inequalities and ensure that all children have access to nutritious diets requires bold ambition and a commitment to action. We’re glad to be working with industry partners who share these aims, and who are willing to keep on stretching their work and leading the field.

What’s next

Over the next five years, we’ll continue our work to shape healthier and more equitable food environments, and we look forward to collaborating with a wide range of partners to achieve this.

Building on Tesco’s commitments, ShareAction is currently engaging with other supermarkets and manufacturers through the Healthy Markets programme, asking companies to play their part in enabling a healthy population.

This year, retailers and manufacturers participating in the Collaboration for Healthier Lives will also be scaling their interventions nationally, with a focus on food categories that will make the biggest difference for people shopping on a low budget. We’re excited about the opportunity to track data from this work and build evidence about the important roles that the food industry, and related policy, must play in tackling dietary inequalities.

If you’d like to get in touch about our work to create healthier food retail environments, please contact Louise Foreman.

To learn more about our Foundation’s progress as a responsible investor, contact Matthias Lomas.